Organic Vs. Conventional

Recently a friend of mine made me aware of a story from CNN’s Jack Cafferty stating that organic food is no healthier or nutritious than regular conventionally raised food. Immediately I was up in arms, as I have been living the organic life for the some time now. After some good natured ribbing and a look at Mr. Cafferty’s blog post I decided to take a deeper look. The basis of the Mr. Cafferty’s declaration is a study commisioned (i.e. funded) by the U.K. government and published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. I found it strange that an american publication would be running this, but after following the money trail I can now see why. Thanks to the good people at opensecrets.org I found that big agriculture and food processing was responsible for almost 150 million dollars of donations to the U.S. government in 2008 alone. Industrialized Ag is highly tied to government, and when they smaller organic farms start to take market share they get mad, but I digress. The research team “looked” at 50,000 studies conducted over 50 years and found that there was no significant difference between organic and conventional foods. I immediately found the free abstract for the paper online, but was left wanting more. Being a curious fellow I shelled out the $8 to get a copy and get a more in depth look at the so called research.

What did I get for my 8 hard earned bucks? Six pages of what I consider to be less than thorough work on such an important and topical subject. For starters the conclusion that was arrived at was not based on 50,000 studies as you may have been led to believe, but only 55 that were consider satisfactory. Secondly, these studies were found through normal means that you or I might use when researching for a college term paper. The team stuck a few different keywords into scholarly article search engines, like pubmed.com, and hit search! I know you’re probably thinking that this is nuts, but try to keep in mind that all searching and subsequent data extraction was performed by 2 research assistants! After extraction the data had to be synthesized into hard numbers. This was tricky as the studies varied on representation of the data, controls, sample size, etc...

“Most of the studies contained no information of the sample size or variablity around central estimates. The analysis presented is therefore a pragmatic choice that permitted the available data to be used to its fullest extent. We calculated the standardized percentage difference in the reported mean nutrient content, as follows:

[(Content of nutrient in organically produced foodstuff-content of nutrient in conventionally produced foodstuff)/content of nutrient in conventionally produced foodstuff]X100.”

This leads me to believe that the research team simply pressed on to get a satisfactory result for themselves and funder, the U.K. government, to push political agendas forward. Surprising that this study is so lacking even after being subject to an independent expert review panel consisting of two people! And shocking as it may seem they were both connected to the U.K. government. What really struck me as sad was how the bulk of the discussion portion of this paper brought notice to the poor quality of the research they had found, and how limited the team was in finding better data. The actual details of nutrient content was condensed to a paragraph and a couple of tables, which were inconclusive at best. The Nutritional categories used, which again were fairly random and based on what was available, were: Nitrogen, Vitamin C, Phenolic compounds, Magnesium, Calcium, Phosphorous, Potassium, Zinc, Total Soluble Solids, Copper, and Titratable Acidity. Organic foods showed an higher value in phosphorous and titratable acidity, but lost out on nitrogen content to conventional food. On the rest they were even. Again, they were only using the standards and methodology given in this particular study. The data for livestock was an even bigger joke. Breaking down the nutrient content for meat was relegated to only two categories; Fats and Ash! Who out there is worried about Ash content in their meat? And the fats were unspecified, so we have no way of breaking down the omega-3’s versus omega-6’s. Not to mention CLA content which is proposed to be a quality source of antioxidants and anti-cancer agents. We couldn’t get anything on protein content and amino acids here either. A complete disregard of for livestock is evident. We simply need more information before such a bold claim can be made.

Moving on to what I feel is most important is the complete lack of attention given to other potentially harmful compounds found in our food. Quoting once again from the study, “We did not address difference in contaminant contents (e.g. herbicides, pesticides, or fungicide residues) or the possible environmental consequences of organic and conventional agricultural practices because this was beyond the scope of our review.” Aside from the fact that I do agree that delving into agricultural practices would be outside the realm in this case, I have to disagree with not including contaminant content. If they believe that people buy organic strictly because they feel its more nutritious then they are truly out of touch. It doesn’t matter if the Vitamin C content is the same if you ingest millions of particles of pesticides that offset any benefit you may have seen from said Vitamin C, it’s about overall health! Do a quick google search using pesticides+cancer and see what comes back. It’s staggering how much information is out there on the link between the two. I recently read an article about people in foreign countries using pesticides for suicide! Are they specifically dodging these issues? Possibly. Is it due to the government funding? Possibly. Shame on them for being so obtuse and casual about such an important subject. When large news outlets publicize things of this nature it’s downright negligent to not put in the due diligence and get to the root of the issue.

I could spend all day spouting off the benefits gained from eating organic foods, but the best way to really find out is to try it for yourself. Go to your local grocer or co-op and get one weeks worth of organic food and spend the next week eating only that food. Nothing processed or from a restaurant, just real-whole food. If you don’t feel better and more invigorated then maybe I’m just crazy, but I think you will feel a change. You have to remember that pesticides are foreign to the body, meaning that it is ill prepared to process them effectively. Nine times out of ten those harmful chemicals are being stored away in fat deposits and keep polluting the body over time. Also keep in mind that the same goes for any animal foods that you might eat. If you have a nice fatty steak from an over-drugged poorly fed animal, all the crap that was in them will now make its way into you! It’s real simple when you break it down and try to forget about all the hype surrounding these topics. Just remember to keep digging after you read some random news blurb, there is always more to the story!